Brazil: Nutrition for Growth Meeting

Ireland will attend the Nutrition for Growth meeting taking place today (4 August 2016) in Rio de Janeiro. The meeting will be a follow up to the successful Nutrition for Growth (N4G) Summit held in London in 2013, when participants pledged over US$4 billion in new commitments towards fighting malnutrition.

Woman farmer Ms Helena Kimai in her fields in Manyara Tanzania. Copyright: Tanzania Natural Resource Forum (TNRF)

Nutrition has been prioritised in Irish Aid policy since 2008. The eradication of hunger and under-nutrition is a cornerstone of Ireland’s development aid programme and a key pillar of our foreign policy. This was reaffirmed in Ireland’s Ireland’s policy for international development, ‘One World, One Future’ (May 2013), and in the ‘Global Island’ Review of Irish Foreign Policy (January 2015).

Irish Aid Support for Nutrition

At the 2013 N4G Summit, the Taoiseach pledged that Irish Aid would double both nutrition specific and nutrition sensitive expenditure by 2020 (against 2010 baselines).  Nutrition specific interventions directly address nutrition, such as targeted supplementary feeding to treat moderate acute malnutrition. Nutrition sensitive interventions means support to areas that indirectly may improve nutrition, such as agriculture and food security, healthcare, education and water services.

Irish Aid is on track to meet our commitments in this area through prioritising nutrition in existing programmes and with new resources.  In 2014, Irish Aid spent €15 million on nutrition specific actions and €44 million on nutrition sensitive actions, together representing approximately 10% of overall Irish ODA. We have already surpassed our 2013 nutrition sensitive target, which was €42m per year by 2020.

This week’s Nutrition for Growth meeting in Rio de Janeiro aims to mark the progress made in tackling malnutrition since 2013, and to highlight the ongoing challenges that need to be overcome if we are to reach the World Health Assembly (WHA) targets and the UN Sustainable Development Goal 2 - to end hunger.

Leaders, practitioners and beneficiaries of nutrition interventions will have the opportunity to share their stories with a range of senior figures from Governments, multilateral agencies, the private sector and civil society.

The eradication of hunger and under-nutrition is a cornerstone of Irish Aid policy

Women and Nutrition

Irish Aid also focusses on supporting smallholder agricultural production and in particular on the role of women farmers in this context. We work hard to ensure that violations of women’s rights, gender inequalities and women’s disempowerment are recognised by the entire international community as a major contributor to global hunger and under-nutrition. We support women’s empowerment as essential drivers of positive change in the fight against global hunger and under-nutrition.

In addition, Ireland is a founding supporter of the Scaling Up Nutrition (SUN Movement) which focuses on maternal, infant and child nutrition, and increasing political will and investment to address under-nutrition in early childhood.